EAST PaC Version II 1985-2015

In modern democracy, voters should be able to use elections to control parties and politicians. Citizens lose control when their electoral voice does not compel parties and politicians to act according to the will of the people. Repeated free and fair elections are supposed to function as a mechanism of electoral control.

To evaluate electoral control, citizens need the right data on candidates, parties, and parliamentarians. In this edited book, we present a step towards electoral control by presenting the methodology of the East European Parliamentarian and Candidate dataset (EAST PaC). These data are the universe of candidates and parties who stood for national parliamentary elections in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary from the 1990s to the 2010s. Candidates are matched over time, rendering a dataset that allows researchers to track the political careers of every candidate, from the thousands who never won to the few political lifers whose parliamentary careers are decades long. With EAST PaC, we can achieve new insights into electoral politics of Central and Eastern Europe.

This book contains everything that scholars need to use EAST PaC. We designed the book for regional specialists and non-specialists; for seasoned scholars of representation, accountability, and political inequality, and for those who are newly interested in these concepts. We hope to intrigue potential users of EAST PaC and to attract new scholars to study electoral politics in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary.

This book is funded by Poland’s National Science Centre (Sonata Bis decision number 2012/05/E/HS6/03556).

Archiving of research data is not a new issue. Researchers have been aware of the need to establish such an institution for a long time. Depositing and providing the access to the database allows for the openness of the research workshop, which contributes to standardization of the research procedures and enriching the knowledge on social research methodology.

Data archiving and rendering them accessible via one institution allows the spread of measurement tools construction standards, including the rates of social phenomena measurement. It allows for their inter-subjective control and provides not only ready-made patterns, but it also becomes an inspiration for new research on the basis of the already existing projects.

Collecting information on the projects that have already been completed or are being conducted, allows for gathering information and data source for the execution of one's own analyses with the usage of the already existing data and basing on the projects that have been executed by the others. What is important, in this way one can avoid the duplication of the research, and on the other hand, the researches can be enriched.

Data archiving and rendering them to the public on redistribution basis is an outstanding auxiliary material, that can be used for educational reasons. The diversity of the researched issues, methodological concepts and the research results that any person using the data from Archive can take advantage of, is undoubtedly a valuable material serving to spread the social science both among the professionals as well as among those who just enter the world of social research.

It often happens that the researchers limit the hypothesis set to the objectives that they have posed while planning their research. Making use of already existent sets of data allows them to reach beyond the objectives that had been posed before the research started. The access to the data provided to people who have not been related to the project, opens the way to new discoveries and verification of the hypotheses different from the ones that were posed as the objective of the research at the beginning. Therefore, the researchers should take into account such a possibility of making use of the data. Simultaneously, it allows for the enrichment of the amount of information on the social issues and consequently, broadens the knowledge on social life, which is a primary and basic objective of every research.

Giving the Social Data Archives at your disposal we do hope to have our contribution in the execution of these postulates. At the same time, we realize that success of this enterprise depends at the same extent on the work of the people responsible for the organization and running the Archive, as well as the researchers themselves, who deposit data with care for their quality and complaisance to the international preparation standards as well as technical and methodological treatment of the sets and documentation.

The demands on the data deposited in the Archives as well as the standard procedures of their preparation have been described in "Social Data Preparation Manual".